Re: hp-ux on x64?
--"Wrong! There are a wealth of common applications for all three on Itanium, such as Oracle or SAP applications"--
Not as many proprietary vendor apps for RHEL on Itanium as HP-UX. Plus, most top vendor apps on RHEL x86 are Tier 1, that was never the same situation for RHEL IA64. There was just no incentive for vendors to invest in it. A classic chicken and egg situation.
--"I have benched solutions on Superdome using all three OS so that the board could see which offered the best performance and bang-for-the-buck with a particular app stack"--
Is that supposed to fill us with a sense of even handedness and fair competition? You are after all potentially the UKs biggest HP-UX fanboi ;)
--"So the idea that hp pushed out RH and MS on Itanium by just pushing hp-ux solutions misses the fact that hp weren't leading the sale on most deals, it was the resellers"--
I have a long history of mixing it with resellers, and my experience has _always_ been that when a reseller pitches an Itanium solution they _always_ pitch HP-UX unless the customer specifies otherwise. There is always more money in it for them, and you don't bite the hand that feeds you. You're being deliberately disingenuous Matt.
--"This is where hp-ux beat RHEL on Itanium - hp was simply able to fund more developers and thus gave us customers more app options at an earlier date"--
Ah, so at last you agree with me: that there was never a truly competitive market on IA64 between RHEL and HP-UX, because HP stacked the application deck in their favour by funding more development themselves. RH don't do this -- their pockets are not deep enough to spend money like that chasing proprietary apps on a platform where there are hardly any players representing their interests in front of the customer. HP had to because for their Unix business it was a matter of survival.
--"Webserving and fileserving, whch is not really an hp-ux on Itanium market"--
Rubbish. I know of several large $1M+ bids involving Telco, Biotech and Finance customers where proprietary Unix on proprietary hardware have lost out to RHEL x86. I only see a tiny fraction of what's going on out there, but there are lots of big business success stories for RH.
--"and if they decided there was money there for hp-ux on x64 then you can be sure they would be using hp's rep, marketing clout and cash to push hp-ux in a manner RH or Novell can't match."--
You forget two things. 1) RH don't have that hill to climb, they've already done it. hp-ux on x86 would have a competitor that is already in its prime. 2) Do you seriously think any amount of marketing money is going to make a proprietary unix with the licensing costs HP-UX is encumbered with competitive with RHEL? HP would have to completely rethink how they finance development and expect to retain a profit. Seriously, proprietary unix only makes business sense on proprietary hardware sold at proprietary prices to rich customers prepared to buy into the belief that they are getting something special. It cannot survive in the commodity system market. Sun tried and failed to make a profit despite having a bigger customer base than HP-UX and more ISVs in their pocket. HP-UX would do no better.
--"I agree in that hp really doesn't want to go head-to-head with Linux on x64 "--
So what are you arguing for then? ;)
--"As I've said before, the real crunch could be if UNIX goes 128-bit"--
There's no market or reason for that to happen in our working life time. The move from 32bit to 64bit was a no brainer as the 4GB limit is easy to hit. But there's a ton of leg room left in 64bit.